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I'm a Mac junkie now, but rewind 4 years back and I used to build my own tower PCs like no tomorrow. I loved to pick out the best of the best components and put them together only to sell what I had done and start over again. To me, Lian Li has always stood for excellent looking aluminum cases, but they were bloody expensive then and are still today. I dreamed of a Lian Li case bak then, but I never got to build a PC with one of those beauties. :( It's great to see them still making top-notch stuff, though. Some of the better companies faded into oblivion, like SuperFlower. CoolerMaster used to make some good stuff back then, but no longer. :/ I'd put my money on Lian Li if I still had the passion to build tower PCs.Reply

I'd guess not. He looked at the picture and said, "That's a nice looking case!" Too bad it doesn't have the performance to back it up, unless maybe you just want to run a Core i3 CPU with now discrete GPU? Buying a $110 case for such a PC seems a bit much, though, and it still performs like A55.Reply

Yeah. I have a PC-G50. It is smaller than this ( 14.5" tall or so ), and has 3 3.5" drive slots. With the Add-on 4in3 bay adapter, I've had 7 HDD in it at one time. Plus it added a 120mm intake fan into the mix.

It is not the perfect case for a couple of reasons. but I am very happy with it. However, it is by far in my mind a better design compared to this.

Move the PSU horizontal, sideways, and reverse ( with perhaps an adapter cable going out to the back ). After removing the drive bay from the bottom of course.. Then add ventilation for the PSU intake, front, or side ( both ? ). Just thinking out loud here . . . Still lots of things could be done to improve this design. Obviously.Reply

Lian Li makes some great cases, this may not be one of them but there are a lot of other models so if you like the look of this there probably is a case for you in there somewhere. I have a PC-9F that is quite similar but a bit bigger than this that's just great.Reply

If you use Macs then what in the world are you doing on this site poser? This site is for computer enthusiasts and those into the latest and greatest, open standards and system, fastest machines around that can be upgraded and overclocked. Apple products don't fit under any of those headings. Maybe if we created an "overpriced preschool computing" Apple would fit nicely. No one wants Apple crap around here buddy.Reply

You just proved that you are not a regular here. Every new Mac/iPhone/iPad gets heavily reviewed here.

This site is for "Computer Enthusiast" like you said. That means ALL COMPUTERS. Not just non-Macs. I also find it funny that you says its for Open Standards, which most things reviewed here run Windows.

Thank you for the thorough review Dustin. I know you dislike having to rag on and thumbs down something that people put effort into, but as potential customers we appreciate it, and Lian Li shouldn't be excused too much. While I very much appreciate companies that are willing to really experiment and push the envelope, they aren't running a charity, they're charging real money and have a duty to be professional. Basic thermal testing isn't rocket science, it's the sort of thing that any company should be doing as a continuous part of R&D, precisely to catch these issues. It's a core part of the engineering they should be doing. If you could get those numbers, they should have been able to as well long before ramping manufacturing. Someone should have said "hey wait a second, this isn't going to be that compelling, I guess we have to go back to the drawing board here."

I worry that a lot of companies don't use measurement-based reality checks as much as they should be. I hear a lot of "well design is an art, not a science" type of wishy-washy statements (the audio industry seems to be the worst), but ultimately science is definitely a part. They should be as wild as they like in the concept and prototype stages, but everything should go through a careful measurement filter before further work. Hopefully they can do better next time around, they certainly have the engineering chops to produce excellent work. Everyone produces duds once in a while, if it's not a pattern then they can bounce right back with a useful lesson learned.

I'd optimize for depth instead of height. mATX, ODD above board, PSU and HDDs below. Straight front to back airflow. 2x 140 or 2x 180 in front should be enough. Depth of 350mm should be achievable.Reply

then i guess when i tested the noise levels with and without and found a very noticeable improvement, i must be absolutely incompetent to make the judgement... thank you for showing me the path wifiwolfReply

It seems like a major mistake to not let the PSU get its own air from the front, especially since it dumps its hot air at the bottom of the case. The way it is now it just recycles its own hot air. Genius... This is beside all the other cooling problems what with the GFX blocking the flow.

Dustin, I'm curious though why you mounted the CPU cooler horizontally and not vertically to help the airflow along. Was it not possible or is that deviating from the testing methodology since the heat sink might perform differently after being reseated?Reply

I cannot believe that the case designers never thought about where the PSU exhaust is going to come out. The heat generated by the PSU is dumped inside the case. They could have drilled some holes that aligns with the PSU exhaust but even that will also be picked up by the bottom fan and thrown back into the case. All form, no function.Reply

What about just simply turn the top exhaust fan around and make it an intake? In that way the CPU area will get some fresh air that it desperately need. The CPU fan can be position to the other side of the heat sink and double as an exhaust fan, or just add an 140mm to the back.

The power supply positioning is a massive failure though. It has no dedicated intake or out take, and ends up being a pure heat generator tuck away at the bottom corner. If they just poke some hole in the front panel and at the bottom and separate the PSU into its own thermal zone this case could have been something.

Hopefully they do a revision soon, the case does look sharp and uses space wisely.Reply

Shame about the poor thermals but I suppose to be expected when they adopt a vertical system without rotating the mainboard.

I do like the small form factor full-ATX idea though since a lot of standard ATX cases are approaching gigantic. The average enthusiast doesn't require 7x 5.25" or 6x 3.5" bays. Particularly now that SSD's are mainstream and optical drives superflous.

A couple of years ago I did a build for a customer in an A05, which, similarly to the A55, tries to fit an ATX board in an mATX sized enclosure. It was a bit cramped, but not that bad, and thermal performance was solid given that I had an overclocked i7-920 and a GTX 260 in there. The A05 had a totally different internal layout; I can't image why they decided to change it - this is anything but an improvementReply

The A05 doesn't work well unless you cut a hole in the top or add a slot fan. I never kept the front panel on because of heating concerns, which turned out to be true as my motherboard chipset fried from the heat, taking out the video card in the process.Reply

This thought may be anathema on a "latest and greatest" enthusiast site, but if one simply wanted a small ATX case, and used only on-board ports with no additional cards, it seems to me that most of the other issues are not deal-killers.

Granted the PSU mount isn't ideal, but without add-in cards the airflow would likely overcome that problem, and finding a way to raise the box off the floor a half an inch or so isn't a big deal either.

Some people will pay $110 for the size and looks of a case, but aren't looking to spend $400 on the latest and greatest video card.

So, its by no means a perfect case, or even the best example of a compact case, but that doesn't mean there's no argument for it . . .Reply

I'll probably wind up feeling like a dumbass for saying this, but I can' t believe that the dimensions are correct, esp the height, which is shown as 17.6". One of my machines systems uses a Fractal R3, which feels far more spacious, (and which has room for the PSU under the ATX slots), and it's about the same height.

It measures a little bit higher from the floor, but then it has taller feet, and hence more space under the case for air intake.

So what am I missing? How can this case be almost 18" high and yet have so little vertical space?Reply

Anandtech has now reviewed both the A05FN and A55. However, I believe that both of these cases have inferior designs compared to the original PC-A05N. The A05N retains the inverted layout first seen in the A05A, and the back to front airflow design is arguably much better for CPU cooling. It would be nice to see a review of the older A05N to see whether Lian Li has been going downhill in their more recent designs.Reply

When the site came back this was supposed to be Anand's review of the new Macbook. I can understand him needing a bit of sleep but save the battery rundown tests for next week and let someone remote in to your LAN to run benches.Reply

This is based on the A05N which was a great little case if you are into watercooling, the inverted designed dealt with the airflow problem by having the GPU at the top of the case.

A55 might still be a good watercooling case if you stick to micro ATX cards because the bottom of the case looks perfect for a thick 240 radiator but instead of being a simple case to use, a fair bit of modding seems to be needed.

Go back to the inverted design. Actually scrub the design and start againReply

I have the A05 which has the PSU up front and it the rocks rear intake and front exhaust format well. CPU gets fresh air straight from a 120mm in the rear, the GPU gets frech air from a 1200mm in the side panel and everything is blown out the front by a 120mm and the PSU.

That format works great, but WTH is with this mutant case? Do case designers know that the primary goal is to have a slick looking enclosure that keeps everything cool?

Lian Li, please loose whoever designed this case in next years floods.Reply

"We're at a juncture now where there are very few reasons to go with an ATX motherboard over a Micro-ATX board"

Exactly!! PC form factors need a reboot if they are to survive the next 10 years onslaught of tablets. ITX is a fantastic format limited only by its 17x17 size allowing only a single expansion slot and 2 channels of ram - and that really makes sense when paired with a low profile card in a thin case ... as soon as we need some HDDs, or a larger graphic card, or a soundcard and a graphics card then theres a big void between that and the 4 slot uATX format, filled only by the defunct DTX format (that imo with only 2 slots really didnt give much more of an option to ITX.)

My ideal board would have 3 expansions, 2x16 and 1xPCI, 4 Ram Slots and 6 Satas in a size not much bigger than ITX however this is all moot since the biggest problem is elsewhere too, we still have a problem with things like PSUs, they need to be smaller, same with Optical RW drives, do we need more than a laptop slimline size for opticals?

The first CD i burned in the last century was in a 5.25" bay, while we cant do anything about the width of the disk certainly it could slimline allowing sideways mounting yet there are no standard mountings for slimline Optical drives in the ATX spec.

Apart from the wishful thinking I do believe its time to step down from these humongous tower cases. I am already planning my next build into a uATX but of course anandtech doesnt really cover uATX stuff now does it *grin*Reply

I have the previous version of this case and it has a severe hot spot at the top. The addition of the exhaust fan at the top hopefully resolves this problem. They rotated the power supply so it blows in rather than out (I guess) which is good, because the old fan direction was right over the hard drives, bathing them in warm air from your GPU and CPU. I regularly kept my front panel off because of overheating.

Makes me wonder if I do some minor surgery and flip my fans over, could I achieve something similar?Reply